Slicing and Dicing DC / MD / VA Area Funding Data Provided by Foster.ly

Foster.ly (one of the leading entrepreneurial communities in the greater DC area) just released an absolute treasure trove of data aggregating all of the individual funding deals in the region.  Released as a Google Doc full of raw data, I thought it would be interesting to try to graph out some of the numbers, and see if there was any interesting conclusions that I could draw from the charts.  (Apologies for the static graphs, for the life of me I couldn't get Wordpress to display a more interactive version of them, I'll update this post if I figure it out).

Please feel free to disagree / debate my conclusions in the comments, hope you enjoy!

Conclusions:  Its pretty obvious from the above chart that in the last year or so, months with much larger funding numbers have become a lot more common (almost regular in fact) compared to earlier years.  Average capital raised per month has remained approximately the same (or has been reduced).

Conclusions:  In the last three and a half years, Virginia has raised more money then Maryland and DC combined.  Unknown numbers could swing this conclusion, but not by much.  By and large, Virginia companies are where the money is being raised.

Conclusions:  The only real conclusion I could draw from this is that there are two companies that have raised by and far a lot more money then everyone else:  Osage Bio Energy LLC (In lime green, towards the bottom of the graph) at $300 Million i.e. 5.2% of total funding, and Hungry Machine Inc. (Bright Green)  at $183 Million i.e. 3.1% of total funding.  That large chunk of 25.2% in grey taking up the majority of the chart was categorized as "other" i.e. too small to chart.

According to this article, "Osage Bio Energy LLC was founded in 2007 with the goal of developing and building the first commercial scale ethanol plant in the U.S. capable of processing multiple feedstocks, focusing on winter barley".  The plant and the company was put up for sale before production could begin.

Hungry Machine LLC is the corporate name of a startup we all know and love, Living Social.  Whats interesting to note here is that while according to the data provided, Hungry Machine LLC is only reported to have raised $183 Million,  according to Wikipedia in 2011 they raised $400M in only their most recent funding round - calling the completeness of some of the data (and therefor, some of these conclusions) into question.

Hope you enjoyed by rough back of the envelope analysis.  You can find the raw data at the following link:  http://foster.ly/resources#regional-funding